It’s been over two weeks since WWE aired its two-day WrestleMania 37 spectacular show. That’s given us over fourteen days to think about what the company did with Bray Wyatt’s formerly red hot “Fiend” character. In those fourteen days, we’ve come up with no good explanation for what happened that night. We don’t know what the purpose of the segment or the match with Randy Orton was, but we’re absolutely certain of one thing. WWE has killed the Fiend as a gimmick, and nothing can be done to rescue it now.
In case you didn’t watch WrestleMania or – perhaps more plausibly – you’ve forced yourself to forget the atrocity that was heaped on the character that night, here’s a refresher. The Fiend, Bray Wyatt’s movie monster alter ego, was “burned alive” by Randy Orton at the TLC pay-per-view event at the end of 2020. From then until WrestleMania – a period of more than three months – the feud between the two characters was carried by Orton and the Fiend’s “companion” Alexa Bliss. This even led to a scheduled match between Bliss and Orton at WWE Fastlane, at which point the Fiend made his long-awaited reappearance. He was even more horrific than he was when we last saw him, with a burnt facemask and burnt clothes. The angle set the stage for Orton and the Fiend to have a WrestleMania showdown.
What everybody in the area and watching at home expected to see was a new, more vicious version of the Fiend make a triumphant comeback by crushing Orton like a bug. Instead, WWE served us nonsense. The Fiend was magically healed on the way to the ring, returning to his previous “unburned” form using cheap special effects. Orton and Wyatt then wrestled inconclusively for five minutes before Alexa Bliss magically appeared at the top of the “jack in the box” prop that the Fiend emerged from before the match. She had black ooze of some kind running down her face. The Fiend, transfixed by this, stopped and pointed at her. Orton then hit the Fiend with an RKO and pinned him clean as the crowd loudly voiced its disapproval.
In case it needs saying, the whole point of the Fiend is that the character is essentially indestructible. He’s survived being burned to a cinder. He took roughly one hundred chair and hammer shots from Seth Rollins but kept getting back up. Like the Undertaker before him, he’s a supernatural character with regenerative powers. He should not, under any circumstances, lose clean to a single finisher. It was bad enough when Bill Goldberg beat him in Saudi Arabia. That didn’t go down well with fans at the time. This was even worse. 53-year-old Goldberg inflicting the first-ever defeat on the Fiend was egregiously bad booking, but it at least took Goldberg several spears to get the job done. Kofi Kingston has kicked out of a single RKO before, as have several other members of WWE’s upper midcard. The Fiend could not, and his mystique is forever ruined because of it.
Worse still, it appears as if WWE is actively trying to shift the whole Fiend gimmick away from Wyatt and onto Bliss. We’ve seen Wyatt only once since WrestleMania, and it was in a pre-filmed vignette. Rather than focusing his attention on revenge, he delivered his segment in the style of a Southern Baptist minister and showed no signs of the Fiend lurking beneath the smiling surface at all. Bliss, on the other hand, is continuing to deliver “Firefly Funhouse” segments with ghoulish makeup and has introduced a demonic doll character.
WWE has form for this. When Daniel Bryan first got the “yes” chant over with fans, an attempt was made to get it off him. Through positioning AJ Lee between Daniel Bryan and CM Punk, the company tried to get the “yes” chant onto her and separate it from its inventor. That failed because fans loved Bryan too much. We’re not sure the same can be said for Wyatt. The WrestleMania debacle has killed whatever enthusiasm fans had left for the character, and if Bliss is presented as “the new Fiend,” it’s possible that fans will accept it. Wyatt clearly has an exceptionally creative mind, but if our worst fears about the fate of his character are true, then he might want to consider whether he, like former tag team partner Matt Hardy before him, might be better used elsewhere. For the avoidance of doubt, by “elsewhere,” we mean All Elite Wrestling.
All things considered, this has been a dramatic fall from grace for a character that was the single hottest act in the company in late 2019. At one stage, WWE was scheduled to release a new set of online slots in partnership with a company called Bluberi by the end of 2020. Most of those online slots would have been based on the company’s legends of the past. The Fiend would have been one of a handful of present-day WWE stars who would have had their own dedicated online slots creation based around them. As you’ll know if you’re familiar with Rose Slots for New Zealand, the slots never materialised. Bluberi appears to have become inactive, and the online slots never made it past the design stage. If anything sums up the Fiend, perhaps it’s that. The character was highly visible and valued once, and then in the blink of an eye, he’s become an afterthought.
It’s possible that we’re judging the situation too early. Maybe the plan is for the Fiend to come back and wreak a terrible revenge on Alexa Bliss. Perhaps all of this is a masterstroke, and it will push Alexa Bliss into the stratosphere as the most over female competitor on the entire roster. Based on WWE’s booking history, though, we’re not holding out much hope. It looks like the company has dropped the ball on its most promising character in the worst possible way, and it’s too late to fix the damage. WWE ruined the original version of Bray Wyatt by having him lose too many matches. Now they’ve done the same thing with the character Wyatt came up with when he went back to the drawing board. Wyatt might decide that someone else is more worthy of his efforts next time around.
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